CE 6: Not Just Christians Go to Heaven Because God Is in Us All

“The Fundamental Orthodox interpretation of the bible isnt my cup of tea. If you find truth in it that is great! Call me a simpleton, but for me intellect and scripture give me thoughts and beliefs, but realization and understanding give me truth. I tend to believe that truth comes from the heart. Before I read any scripture, before I meditate, I ask god to allow me to listen with my heart. I always have read things and believed things and thought that i knew things, however until i was struck with some type of understanding or wisdom, now i KNOW things. And what i KNOW is that we are ALL loved by the universe, wether Christian, Jew, Muslim etc….God has spoken to man from the begining of mankind, and God has spoken from the beginning of the universe! Vibration is a beautiful thing….A life giving thing, that a lot of us take for granted nowadays. No man has the right to claim a “license” on the divine. And that is why Christians are not the only ones who are ”saved”. Look at what Jesus said when a man asked him, “What is the most important commandment of all?” Jesus began, “The First is, `Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is One…’” (Mark 12: 20-32) God is in us all, and until we stop seperating ourselves war and inbalance will reign. Christ, Buddha, Krishna (God, God, and God) all love you ”

I want to make an observation about something you said early on. You said, “Before I read any scripture, before I meditate, I ask God to allow me to listen with my heart.” With all due respect, I think your statement is problematic in this sense: You haven’t explained what good reason there is for why a “heart-felt” understanding is necessary to comprehend anything. By the way, it seems like the way you’re characterizing what you’re doing is a little misleading. It’s not like the organ that pumps blood throughout your body has any ability to interpret language or contemplate truth. You’re simply using a figure of speech to mean that you are using something besides reason and logic to“understand” meditation or to “understand” Scripture. So, my question is: How can you understand anything without using the faculties of your mind like reason and logic? The answer is: You cannot. Everything is interpreted by your mind whether you want it to be or not. Even mystical experiences must be interpreted by your rational mind in order to draw a conclusion pertaining to what your experience was about. For more on this notion, see Drawing Conclusions from Meditation. But this goes beyond spiritual matters. You wouldn’t even be able to understand the words that I am currently writing to you if you did not use your mind. So, not only is using your mind normal to do, but it’s something we must do to understand anything– physical or spiritual.

You quoted Mark 12:29 but stopped short of what the actual commandment was – which was to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, etc. Had you done this you would have realized that the phrase, “the Lord is one,” isn’t even a commandment. A commandment is a command to do something. Another way of saying this is: It is an edict or decree to follow a particular rule. But the phrase, “the Lord is one,” is not a command. It is simply a statement about something. Therefore, you’ve misunderstood the particular passage you quoted and it does nothing to support your argument that, “God is in us all.”

By the way, just for clarification, in Mark 12:29-30 Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6:4 where Moses began a list of commandments by first making a proclamation that, “the Lord is one.” We see why he made such a proclamation a few verses later, in vv. 14-15, when he addressed the plurality of gods that were being worshipped by the neighboring pagan communities. Therefore, the context shows that Moses was distinguishing between the one, true God and many false gods; not, as you asserted, to show that God is in all people. Lastly, your comment on Buddha, Krishna, and Christ all being the same God presupposes that all religions are basically the same (or are aspects of the same Truth). However, in order to draw this conclusion you must treat religions in an inferior way to the fuller systems that they actually are. If you take each religion on its own merits, you would discover each has an inherently exclusive quality that renders them incompatible with each other. So it seems to me that the true seeker would be more openminded than you are being to the religions you listed and try to assess them with the fairness they deserve.